Every Broken Little Thing

"Every Broken Little Thing is a love letter. A love letter to hard labor and honest work. To the soft gold light at first glance of dusk. To nostalgia--words that take the thread of memory and unravel it back to the source. There is grief, wonder, small wounded things. Adrian also captures the tremendous wild of living and its juxtaposition of heartache and sweetness, how they remain in helix together. In this collection, Adrian is gentle but insistent in reminding the reader: "so much depends upon remembering/that there is nothing after this, and then/making the most of what comes next."

-Nikki Allen, author of Hotwire

"Adrian Lime's deeply affecting poems chronicle how rootedness is made in daily practice and attention, how essential it is to joy, meaning, grace, humor, and love in the midst of human existence, always also ragged by loss, doubt, fear, and grief. Poems of boyhood "reassemble shattered memories" with wild disarming glints of humor. Adolescence and young adulthood are conjured in all of their unruly self-doubt and determination to really see the world (no fewer than 17 poems trace walking in Toledo "late in dark parts"). So many poems testify to a speaker gravely, sweetly, unreservedly rooted in a long-time marriage, the plan strongly worded in the anaphoric "What We Will Do," which constructs both present and future, gathering the familiar into an intimate desire for shared experience (It ends with the daring "We will eat peaches."). The risky business of fatherhood is achingly evoked: first moments of lost innocence, the effort to teach "my children how to find kindness / in a brutal world." These poems are also rooted in work: the work of poetry and the hard physical work of the assembly line. Lime's poems merge the two with conviction: the poems about poetry are poems about the Jeep factory and vice-versa. This "House of Poetry" gleams with "the grease from the factory," it is textured by "the soil of the field. "

-Dr. Sara Lundquist, University of Toledo